Saturday, March 31, 2018

Remember Mireille Knoll. A Holocaust survivor, suffering
from Parkinson’s disease, she was murdered last week in her home in Paris. Her
killers stabbed her to death and set fire to her apartment. They were punishing
her for being Jewish.

Given that it’s Paris, I do not need to tell you that her
murderers were Islamists.

Parisian
authorities are investigating the murder as being motivated by the “membership,
real or supposed, of the victim of a particular religion.” But euphemisms
should have no place in describing the nature of Mireille Knoll’s death. She
was murdered by men apparently animated by the same hatred that drove Hitler.

Two
suspects, a 29-year-old and a 21-year-old, have been arrested. The older man is
a neighbor Ms. Knoll has known since he was a child. The younger, according to
reports, is homeless. One of the suspects told the investigators that the other
had shouted “Allahu Akbar” while killing Ms. Knoll, according to Le Monde. (A
lawyer for the Knoll family, Gilles-William Goldnadel, confirmed that in a
phone call.) On Tuesday, Gérard Collomb, the interior minister, told Parliament
that one of the attackers had told the other: “She’s a Jew. She must have
money.”

It was not an isolated incident:

It’s a
neighborhood that has already borne witness to a nearly identical crime. Almost
exactly a year ago, a 65-year-old Jewish widow named Sarah Halimi was murdered
by her neighbor, 27-year-old Kobili Traoré. Other neighbors said they heard Mr.
Traoré scream “Allahu Akbar” as he beat Ms. Halimi, a retired doctor, to near
death in the early hours of April 4, 2017. He then threw her body into the
courtyard below.

It took
months for Ms. Halimi’s murder to be categorized as an
anti-Jewish hate crime. “It was scandalous,” said Mr. Goldnadel, the lawyer,
who also represented the Halimi family.

This
time, French authorities have been quick to call the crime by its proper name.
On Monday, President Emmanuel Macron tweeted: “I would like to express my shock
at the appalling crime committed against Mrs. Knoll. I reaffirm my absolute
determination to fight anti-Semitism.” On Wednesday, he said that she was
murdered “because she was Jewish” at a tribute to a police officer killed in an
Islamist attack. Mr. Macron has been widely praised by the country’s Jewish
community for his moral clarity in describing anti-Zionism as a “reinvented
form of anti-Semitism.”

So, it’s not the radical right. It’s not supporters of
Marine Le Pen. It’s not even members of the alt-right. It’s Islamists:

Anti-Semitism
was supposed to be a disease of the far right. But the people actually killing
Jews in France these days are not members of the National Front. They are
Islamists.

“The
major crimes against the Jewish community — Ilan Halimi, the Toulouse killings,
the Hyper Cacher killings, Sarah Halimi — all of them have all been carried out
by radicalized Muslims,” Robert Ejnes, the executive director of CRIF, an
umbrella organization of French Jewish groups, told me in a call from Paris.
“These young people have French identity cards, but they hate what France
stands for. This is the nature of the problem we are facing. And it’s very hard
to talk about.”

Here
are some facts that are very hard to talk about: Jews represent less than 1
percent of the population in France, yet in 2014, 51 percent of all racist
attacks were carried out against them, according to the French Interior
Ministry. A survey from that year of about 1,000 French respondents with
unknown religious affiliation and 575 self-identified Muslims, conducted by the
AJC Paris and the French think tank Fondapol, found that the Muslim respondents
were two or three times more likely to have anti-Jewish sentiments than those
from the random French group. Nineteen percent of all respondents felt that
Jews had “too much” political power. Among Muslims, the number was 51 percent.
As for the idea that Zionism “is an international organization that aims to
influence the world and society in favor of the Jews,” 44 percent of Muslims
surveyed approved of this statement. The rest of the survey is just as
devastating.

For
years now, France has deployed armed troops to protect
Jewish synagogues and schools. But the violence on the streets — a 15-year-old
girl wearing the uniform of her Jewish school slashed in the face; an 8-year-old boy wearing a kippah
assaulted; teenage siblings called “dirty Jews” before
being beaten — hasn’t abated. On Wednesday, hours before a march in honor of
Mireille Knoll, the office of the Union of French Jewish Students at the
Sorbonne was ransacked and defaced with graffiti like
“Viva Arafat” and “death to Israel.”

Notably, French security forces are not soft on terrorism.
When facing Islamists, they shoot to kill. And yet, the problem is the numbers.
Something like 10% of the French population is Muslim. Most of them are not
assimilated. They live in enclaves, especially around Paris, that are No-Go
zones. Unless they decide that it’s time to assimilate, they will end up being
expelled from France. It is sad, but perhaps the only way to deal with the
problem.